We will Rock you!

I see from Jonathan Schwartz's blog that the first samples of the next-generation SPARC cpu for the data centre, codenamed Rock, have arrived. Congrats to everyone at Sun and their partners who made this happen!

For my fellow geeks, here's a picture of the CPU:



(You'll have to read Jonathan's blog for a peek at the bottom!)

Rock, like Niagara, has multiple cores, each of which can run multiple threads. The first release of Rock will have 16 cores, each of which can run an unspecified number of threads. My guess is that they'll run at least 4 threads per core, which means that we're effectively talking about a Starfire (E10000) on a chip!

As AC/DC's Brian Johnson might say: For those about to Rock (We compute you)!